10 different series of paperworks spanning 43 years – a suite of 3 works from each. This sweep of the archive is Julia Morison’s latest exhibition at Jonathan Smart Gallery. We stand before an extraordinary range of materials – most often beautifully controlled inks, watercolour and densely worked fields of charcoal. Eye-catching however, is Morison’s use of dragon’s blood on Bible paper in the Centrefolds (2000); and her manipulation of cotton dipped in earthquake silt, to de-stabilise and un-nerve compositions in 3 small exquisitely framed Grid paintings (2011). The subtle shifts of weight and form in Towards Rhombus (1982) are also memorable – exacting line and the calibration of mass carefully executed in charcoal and coloured pencil.

There are of course, references to lead, ash, silver and gold – materials from Morison’s alchemical vocabulary, first mapped and given symbolic form in Vademecum (Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa, 1985). That beautifully loaded table of elements is significant in Morison’s practice. Ode to Hilma (City Gallery, Wellington 2024) offered a similarly virtuoso turn in hybridising form and materials at scale, something that few in Aotearoa even aspire to. This is what Julia Morison does. She invests (the allure of) matter with context and meaning, so that even in a comparatively small exhibition as this is, the effect is magisterial!
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